The day after you fall you find out new information. Seems I extended one arm in an unnatural posture, and now it feels as iof I pitched a professional baseball game with extra innings. Foot worked poorly, too, but i subscribe to the school of thought that says “walk around until it loosens up.” This is the same school of thought that advises hitting yourself on the forehead with a hammer if you have a tension headache, I guess.

If you don’t live in this clime, or have no experience with protracted winter, you don’t know about the Icy Banks. The snowplows have pushed the excess snow into heaps by the sidewalk. The brief rain coated them with ice. Getting out of your car requres walking over the mountain ridge, feeling less sure-footed than a goat, then occasionally plunging your foot into the snowbank, whereupon the ice scrapes your shin and snow gets in your pants.

“Snow gets in your pants” is not a romantic ballad sung by Nat King Cole, despite the sound of it.

Well, we persevere.

Did I mention I was doing a clean install of everything on my computer? And you were practically panting with excitement to learn how that turned out?

I’m agonizing over the music. In the old days: you had a hundred albums or so, arranged on a particle-board shelf with concrete blocks on the end. If you were in college. Or you had them arranged in purloined milk crates. HEY if they didn’t want them stolen they shouldn’t have made them perfect for albums, man. Besides, Big Milk, like, gets money from the government.

Of the 100 albums, there were ten in rotation, and the rest were there to impress someone else, which they never did, or to bring back a mood, or to check if you still liked it. Quite possibly the ones in rotation weren’t even in the albums, just in the paper sleeves, like new friends hanging around the house in their underwear.

Now I have thousands of albums. I do not need them, but there is no cost to having them.
The problem with music is that there’s no excuse not to have everything on your machine, and your phone. This shows my age: I am not content to have everything streamed from THE CLOUD. When I see a little cloud icon next to a piece of music I know I own, it drives me nuts - I want to reach out and gather everything in like chips at the roulette table. If it’s up there, it’s not here.

Except when it is, like Dropbox - stuff is up there AND on your drive. Cool! Except when you don’t want it locally, and want to use the cloud as a backup. Sorry, you forgot to uncheck that option, so we’ll add 80GB of stuff to your hard drive, which your program will then index, guaranteeing your search results are full of innumerable duplicates because you also forgot to tell your indexing program to ignore a certain folder on a connected backup drive.

POINT IS, the easiest way to live is to have as few files as possible, and rarely need any of them. But there are some composers and performances I always want with me, some artists I’ll never not want to have two or three taps away, and I will be got-damned if I pay $15 a month to have it streamed.

I’m also fussy about album art, which I’m sure comes as a massive shock. I made custom album art for all the classical artists, because I can’t stand the usual classical album with a generic 19th century landscape on the cover, or some glowering conductor.

So to answer the question, the repopulation of the new computer is going poorly, because I am trying to decide if the genres Lo-Fi, Chill, Lounge, Ambient Electronica, and so on should be combined into “Down Tempo” and just leave it at that. When it comes down to it, there are only a few genres I need.

Orchestral

Big Band

Jazz stuff real jazz people hate to know I think is jazz

Rock

Rock except lead singer read Tolkein but not Led Zeppelin, and the songs are nine minutes long

Bleepble-blurple boom-tsh boom-tsh

Slightly hammered by the pool around 10 PM

Any other suggestions are welcome.

It’s 1943. A tad on the optimistic side.

A shakeup in the local department store landscape:

They’ve been consolidating since the start, until they got huge, laden with debt, behind the times, and began to collapse. The store is no longer there, but this picture shows what it was like inside at Christmas time. If you love cut-aways, a custom job on the store, here. (On site; large.)

On top of that, buy bonds!

Slow day in the op-ed cartoon world, it seems; this would be an evergreen.

A detail from an ad shows our friend Reddy is on the job, and ready to Back the Attack - no, that wouldn’t be a slogan until the next war bond drive.

Good thing they had the button hooked up in time to give Uncle Sam the plans.

The Brides page: the apogee of a woman’s life at the time, it seems.

The names don’t come back in google searches, except for one whose husband was a doctor. The next page is full of pictures of women helping to Win the War, and the married ones, as was the custom, are known by their husband’s names. Which to modern eyes just looks bizarre.

Well, hav eyou?

A kid could spend a rainy Sunday afternoon on that page. Well, a hour. Well, twenty minutes.

The details:

Those impertinent whippersnappers. One wonders what “elders” meant back then. Fifties? Surely people in their 60s.

I’m pretty sure the answer, in Iowa, is “nothing whatsover.” But everything was bent to the war effort. Even proper bus loading.

The swank place to go for special occasions. Dinner and a show. The names don’t come back. It’s as if Iowa history slipped between the cracks and evaporated.

Mid-week; we can do this! Power throught your Wednesday, and I'll see you tomorrow as hope glimmers on the horizon. Unless we're all dead from UltraCold by then.